The Education of Mike McManus

The following is a clip of an interview with Marshall McLuhan which aired on TVOntario in 1977. The description:

Mike McManus talks to Marshall McLuhan, the internationally-known critic of the media. McLuhan discusses modern regionalism and separatism, nostalgia, violence and identity, television as an addictive tranquilizer, propaganda, and his reasons for becoming a Roman Catholic.

While all of that sounds fascinating, the clip is only three minutes and doesn't capture the whole interview. TVOntario won't let me access the interview on their site, because I'm in the US, but I'd love to get my hands on the whole thing--especially the part about his reasons for becoming a Roman Catholic.

Here is a link to the full length video, if you are in a place where you can watch it:

http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?videoid?76058196001

McLuhan's Sexual Ethics

The word "sex" is wrong to begin with because it is fragmentation. It automatically creates pornography. If you want to create pornography you just separate some aspect of sex and life from everything else. That is pornography. It is fragmentation. Sentimentality is the same way. Take a rich emotion, break it up into bits and you have sentimentality. Sex is fragmentation. The mere abstracting of the word or the concept from the whole complex of lived social existence is unreal. So it is a very good point to begin the investigation by simply challenging the right of that word to exist except as a classification of male and female. Otherwise it probably has no right to exist.

--Marshall McLuhan, Education in the Electronic Age, 

in The Best of Times/The Worst of Times: 

Contemporary Issues in Canadian Education, 1970

Eric McLuhan @ Pattern Recognition

Read Schuchardt has posted a transcript of Eric McLuhan's Wheaton College presentation from several weeks ago. Even if you've heard the talk, it's worth the read.


http://trueslant.com/readschuchardt/2010/09/24/a-wee-sip-from-the-fire-hose/

The Business of Art

The doctrine of names is, of course, the doctrine of essence and not a naive notion of oral terminology. The scriptural exegetists will hold, as Francis Bacon held, that Adam possessed metaphysical knowledge in a very high degree. To him the whole of nature was a book which he could read with ease. He lost his ability to read this language of nature as a result of the fall; and Solomon alone of the sons of men has ever recovered the power to read the book of nature. The business of art is, however, to recover the knowledge of that language which once man held by nature.

Marshall McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 2006

The Dark Night of the Soul

You're bored? That's because you keep your senses awake and your soul asleep.

-- St. Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, 1939
Via: Ruth Miller

The Great Blackout

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us their unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act--the way we perceive the world. Were the Great Blackout of 1965 to have continued for half a year, there would be no doubt how electric technology shapes, works over, alters--massages--every instant of our lives.

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967

On Two Natures

Aristotle first noted that the Greek invention of Nature was made possible when they had left behind a savage or barbaric state (first nature) by putting on an individualized and civilized one (second nature). And A.T.W. Simeons has discussed at length how disruptive the second nature has been to the first. Made discarnate by our electric information media, the west is furiously at work retrieving its obsolesced organic first nature in a spectrum of new aesthetic modes, from feminism to phenomenology. As our second nature consists entirely in our artifacts and extensions and the grounds and narcoses they impose, their etymologies are all to be found in first nature, the wild body.

Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, 1988